The National Security Agency hasn’t exactly stopped spying on Americans en masse just yet, but a new court filing accuses the NSA of unlawfully destroying the evidence it collected against United States citizens for years.

Leaked documents made it clear nearly one year ago that the US
government has been eavesdropping on the communications of
ordinary Americans through a vast surveillance apparatus
maintained by the NSA and exposed by former contractor Edward
Snowden. Before those intelligence leaks began to drip out last
June, though, the NSA was already years into a heated legal
battle concerning allegations surrounding those very spy
programs.

That case — Jewel vs NSA — has indeed been affected by
last year’s disclosures, which confirmed once and for all that
the US intelligence community has, in fact, been collecting a
great deal of personal details pertaining to millions of
Americans on a regular basis. In the midst of that legal back and
forth, however, attorneys for the plaintiffs now say that
“there was no doubt that the government has destroyed years
of evidence of NSA spying.”

Those allegations were formalized in a filing made by attorneys
for the Electronic Frontier Foundation last week in US District
Court for the Northern District of California, where the
Jewel case has been heard by federal judges since 2008 —
five years before the first Snowden leaks occurred.

On June 5, RT will launch special one-year anniversary
coverage dedicated to the Snowden leaks including in-depth
analyses about the revelations he made possible and how they’ve
impacted the world

In a brief filed last Friday by the EFF — a digital rights group
representing a handful of plaintiffs who’ve accused the NSA of
unlawfully spying, including former AT&T customer Carolyn
Jewel — attorneys said the government has admitted to expunging
the spy records it collected against innocent Americans.

Although plaintiffs in the Jewel case and similar ones
have for years been rallying to abolish the NSA’s spy programs,
or at least bring them to light, the federal government is now
being condemned by the EFF for not holding on to evidence
extremely relevant to the plaintiffs’ argument.

In Friday’s brief, EFF attorney Cindy Cohn wrote that “The
government’s own declarations make clear that the government has
destroyed three years of the telephone records it seized between
2006 and 2009; five years of the content it seized between 2007
and 2012; and seven years of the internet records it seized
between 2004 and 2011, when it claims to have ended those
seizures.”

“By destroying this evidence, the government has hindered
plaintiffs’ ability to prove with governmental evidence that
their individual communications and records were collected as
part of the mass surveillance, something the government has
vigorously insisted that they must do, even as a threshold
matter,” Cohn continued. “Although plaintiffs dispute
that the showing the government seeks is required, the
government’s destruction of the best evidence that plaintiffs
could use to make such a showing is particularly
outrageous.”

Cohn, who serves as the legal director for the San Francisco,
California based advocacy group, added in a statement published on the EFF’s website that
similar action undertook by a party other than the federal
government would have surely warranted a reprimand, to say the
least.

"The court has issued a number of preservation orders over
the years, but the government decided – without consent from the
judge or even informing EFF – that those orders simply don't
apply," said Cohn. "Regular civil litigants would face
severe sanctions if they so obviously destroyed relevant
evidence. But we are asking for a modest remedy: a ruling that we
can assume the destroyed records would show that our plaintiffs
were in fact surveilled by the government."

The NSA was targeted by the EFF’s lawsuit after Mark Klein, a
former technician at AT&T, leaked documentation during the
George W. Bush administration that showed the spy agency had been
capturing in bulk the telecommunications of millions of
Americans. Jewel filed suit in response, and soon it was elevated
to class action status. On its part, the government has long
insisted that the case be dismissed under the state-secrets
privilege.